a few years ago you tube set a company wide objective to reach 1000000000 hours of viewing a day netflix creator reed hastings has also said multiple times that the company's biggest competitor isn't another website it's slate so what happens when you give algorithms the goal of maximizing our attention and time online they find our weaknesses and exploit them in 2017 sean parker a founding member of facebook and its 1st president literally confessed to this at an event how do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible and that means that we need to sort of give you a little dope of me in here every once in a while because someone like her commented on a photo or a post or whatever and that's going to get you to contribute more content to a social validation feedback loop that it's like i mean it's exactly the kind of thing that a doctor like myself would come up with because you're exploiting

a vulnerability in human psychology no it's not as though silicon valley pioneered the tricks and tactics of addiction a persuasive design many tech designers openly admit using insights from behavioral scientists of the early 20th century right the concept of randomly scheduled rewards studied and developed by american cycle of just b.f. skinner in the 1950 s. he created what's become known as the skin of books a simple contraption he used to study pigeons and even raccoons at the start of the process a pigeon is given a food every time it picks the would pick or turns a full circle when the word turnip is as the experiment proceeds the rewards become less frequent they take place at random but by that time the behavior has been established the pigeon keeps pecking or turning not knowing when it might get the reward but in anticipation that or award could become. a boxes were. pivotal in

demonstrating how design had the power to modify behavior and if randomly scheduled rewards work for pigeons why not if humans skinner's concept is in fact at the heart of a lot of addictive design from casino machines such as slot machines to social media. smartphones are unnervingly similar to stop machines think about your facebook instagram a painter speeds we all swipe down pause and then wait to see what will appear went back to those randomly scheduled boards again you'll swipe could result in a new comment on a photo when you like or a piece of spam will software update you don't really know and if that unpredictability that makes it so addictive. natasha dosh will lose a cultural anthropologist who spent more than 15 years studying the algorithms behind this waste of design just like on a slot machine when you're texting or when you are looking through the news feed

you really never know what's coming down the pike you never know when you're going to sort of hit that jackpot so to speak when it's coming and how much it will be so the randomness is very important to keep you hooked and i think the fact that we're damn bullying money in a casino isn't really that different than what we're doing because in both cases what we're really gambling is our attention and our time right and across the board we're sitting there sort of hoping for some little reward to never knowing when it's going to. in all cases where we're sort of sitting alone with the machine there's no natural stopping point i think that the similarities are quite striking we check our phones over 150 times a day just like. put up it's the 1st thing we look at when i wake up the last thing we look at before we go to sleep is what we're going. to it and that that's by

design we now have like over 2000000000 skinner boxes and people's pockets we are running the largest experiment like psychological experiment that the world has ever seen by orders of magnitude one out of every 4 human beings on earth has a skinner box which is learning how to uniquely target that. super fascinating in the abstract but sort of terror when you think about what it's doing the research is being done and the evidence is clear that digital technology is being designed with the intention to make us attics it's not a secret in the tech industry that 2 of the biggest tech because bill gates and the late steve jobs admitted they consciously limited the amount of time their children were allowed to engage with the products they helped create. the problem is real but the media can often sensationalize the issue of tech addiction and make it harder for us to understand think that the reason people read maybe reach for the

metaphor of crack cocaine is because they see that as a sort of high speed hyper intensive form of addiction and you know while i don't use that metaphor myself i do think that within the spectrum of media addictions there are certain ones that are more high potency you could say and those are you know if we're going to use the language of addiction they have a higher event frequency think about horse race right you go to the track and you've got to really wait for that event to happen if you are rapidly engaged in an activity such twitter thread. that is more high potency it has a higher event frequency which means each event has an opportunity to draw you in more to reinforce that behavior more so i think we really can apply the language of addiction to these different media i have a ongoing. frustration which is that whenever. i am

still for a 2nd i have this impulse to reach into my pocket and pull out my phone and then i get angry at myself because i say that's that's not right just just enjoy this moment just be be with yourself for a 2nd and then i get angry at myself that my phone has that much power over me right and i'm angry. that i'm subject to the design of a technology in such a way that i have difficulty sort of resisting its allure but of course everything about these technologies is built to to to create that impulse to make it feel as though it's irresistible it's there's such emphasis put on free choice and being able to be a consumer and you make decisions. in the marketplace about what you want to do because you have free will but at the same time the very people who are promoting that notion of the person as a consumer sovereign are operating and designing their technology with

a very different human subject in mind it's somebody who can like a rat or a pigeon or any other animal be incentivized and motivated and hooked and have their attention redirected and that's really interesting to me because it is a kind of return to skinner i think you wouldn't have heard that in the eighty's or ninety's that would have even been creeping you to think about someone designing your behavior but now it's become accepted that you can be a behavior designer and behavior design was one part of what as they used to do in a previous life however he is now one of a growing number of industry insiders who are taking a more critical stance towards silicon just. talking to impressed me wonders does he regret his pot. and want to be like humble about it if i had invented it it would have been invented i just happen to be in the right place for the right

time think about the right kind of thing. yes i do regret it but i do think it talks to like the naive 80 of being like oh here's just a cool feature. and making it and even if it's great for the user without thinking about the effects it'll happen if you can scale it up 100000000 people or 1000000000 people where this little thing that i went around to like twitter and google and all these other companies got a guy who should adopt this now is wasted quite literally hundreds of millions of human hours. i'm sure all of us have had someone say to us stop looking at your phone or why you so we dictate to social media and before i started this series i thought maybe there was something wrong with me i just had no idea how deliberately designed our online experience is and how these design algorithms are made to lessen. its i asked everyone i spoke to how do we change this can we change how

online design works regulation cannot be expected to happen on its own within. these corporations right who are profiting from this because there is just too deep of a conflict of interest and so the only viable kind of regulation is going to have to come from the outside we have to have a public conversation about what is actually going on in these products how are they working and once we understand that as a collective what do we want to limit and constrain so if you start if the assumption that people are never going to fully understands the risks of algorithms and the way in which that interacts with the data then we have to think about what else might work in its place and the data protection regimes

like the general data protection regulation are a great foundation and one of the ways in which we could really improve upon that is to embrace or a trust basis so instead of putting all the risk on the user the requirements of protecting people would fall on the big company that using the algorithms that is using the data i think there is going to be a huge shift from just human centered design as we call it in our field is like put the human at the center which is was a big movement to thinking about human protective design we say that the tools that are big. they are so powerful that they cause real damage to us individually for mental health to our relationships to our children and to us society to our democracies to having civil discourse. and that move to human protective doesn't mean. i think it's super hopeful because then we can actually have technology which does what it was supposed to the 1st place

which is extend our best selves. so if you're concerned about the ways in which data is being collected and algorithms are being used to affect your life there are 3 things i think you can do one use the tools that are given to use privacy dashboards use to factor authentication which is really valuable to be more deliberate in critical about the ways in which companies companies are asking for your information and the devices that you adopt from the services you participate in understand that companies are trying to tell you things through design and they're trying to make things easier or harder and think about whether you want things to be easier and one of the costs of making things easier and i understand that companies are trying to get your consent because their entire business depends on it and so think about that as you

go forward and finally i think that design and consent and privacy and algorithms needed the a political issue and so if someone's running for office ask them what their stance is on algorithmic accountability ask them what their stance is on privacy and data collection because if we get better rules about how the data is collected an algorithm is are used and we might all be better off at this inflection point where our technology is beginning to make predictions about us that are better than the predictions we make about ourselves and one of the best ways of binoculars and is by learning about ourselves more dislike stuff and really ask yourself before you post something to facebook ranting like why am i doing this like what are my motivations if you sort of like slow down your thought process often i've found that it'll be like oh i am pulling this app out because i'm a little bit bored or everyone else has pulled up their phones and feeling a little socially awkward oh that's curious. or maybe like i'm having this

experience and i sort of want to show off just a little bit and just like stopping and thinking about like what are my motivations for doing things i found to be a great. occupation. for spending my time in ways that i wish i had. i'll just say that i recommend having a general attitude shift where you understand yourself as an organism as a creature that can like any other number of creatures and animals be turned in certain directions have your attention swayed caught captured hooked i find it liberating to recognize all of the forces that are exerting these these different powers on me to turn my attention and one way or another and somehow realizing that helps me to disconnect a lot because it makes me

a little bit angry. and i don't feel so bad about myself i feel bad about what's being done to me and that i'm more able to disconnect. peace between ethiopia and eritrea has meant to park areas future for the iraqi people give it some of it doesn't we have to create farmland for souls for arabs it's a matter of survival. a movement trying shows us how the iraq coping with life on the edge of the board up the. mighty few amount is around. the.

centuries it was the remoteness of brazil's indigenous communities the protected them from the rapacious outside walls now it's what shields those who are encroaching on protected indigenous territory starting fires and threatening the residents of the county when i had this 1st contact with the outside walls in 1978 . $189.00 which translated for us into portuguese remembers it well she says they brought diseases that decimated the community but that. we had a lot of land and we lived peacefully really with fear that are very few firsts the invaders are coming closer it's difficult to gauge why a place so remote so tranquil should not so so munch to the rest of the walls the indigenous people who live here with realized that now is the smoke those the skies and the ashes pollute the river the rest of the world is beginning to realize it's

. still navigating dangerous rapids from the time we depart to the time we finished or scares to the fish and dicing with death . i'm afraid of calling i'm afraid of dying but if i don't go for a coffee my family needs the man who go to the extreme just to make a living pot you have to be a strong swimmer otherwise uncertain risking it all vietnam on al-jazeera. russia cast its 13th veto on a u.n. resolution on syria this one calling for a cease fire in italy at the last rebel held part.

i'm fully back to live in doha coming up on al-jazeera and the. team to create a white unity government with me is the leader of israel centrist party leader benny gantz says he will lead a unity government and not his wife all benyamin netanyahu. tunisia's former president ben ali has died in exile after a long battle with illness and more controversy for canada's prime minister a 3rd set of pictures like this one of him in brown face as setlist. we begin with breaking news this hour and russia and china have vetoed a resolution on syria at the united nations security council the resolution which was backed by the vast majority of members called for

a ceasefire in the northwestern province of idlib that's the last rebel house stronghold in syria let's speak to our diplomatic editor james basis at the u.n. for is james tell us what was in this resolution and why the russians and chinese veto it. once again a grim day for syria what the idea of this resolution was and it was drawn up by 3 of the council members the kuwaiti there was one of those he's speaking to the security council right now and he was joined by the belgians and the germans have been working for over a month on this trying to get a cease fire in they knew the problem which was russian objections because of course russia along with the syrian government is a volved in the bombing that's taking place in adlib they drew up a resolution this is a copy of the resolution and they even in that resolution came up with a section in which they said that they could be what they called counterterrorism operations as long as they complied with international law russia though rejected

this resolution joined as they have been many times on resolutions on syria 7 times china has joined russia now 13 times in total with this resolution rejected russia has used its veto with regard to syria so that it sees foreign aid live does not pass worth telling you that russia and china decided to do something that they've also done before which is come up with their own version of a resolution this was then put to security council members sometime after the 1st one this one failed not because of a veto because it didn't get the necessary 9 votes to pass there were 9 members against in that resolution only 2 were for it china and russia and 4 others abstained in that 2nd vote and what was then in the russian resolution what were they calling for. theirs was

a bland more basic resolution and it certainly didn't have that restriction on their operations in aid lab that was in the wrist in the other resolution which it said yes counter-terrorism but not if you break international humanitarian law so we still have i think the un resolve situation of the province of idlib remember wide live is so important certainly it is the last place that the assad government want to recapture and we had deescalation zones all over syria but they have been picked off one by one by the by the assad government and the russians are many of those people have been under deals relocated to providence so many of the fighters of their province many civilians are there over 3000000 people an unresolved problem and a lost battle still potentially looming with vost potentially civilian casualties thank you for that james spader's live for us at the united nations.

leader of israel's blue and white party benny gantz has announced he plans to form and lead a unity government and says the government will be for all the people of israel but did not mention by name and that's now despite the prime minister's call so join him in. a symbolic handshake between rival would be prime ministers benjamin netanyahu and benny gantz choreographed by israel's president reuben rivlin at a memorial for shimon peres a man who held both positions really doesn't have direct political power but he does have influence and in the current deadlock a lot of freedom of action in who to give the 1st chance of forming a government and then i hear loud and clear the voices calling for broad and stable national unity government and i can gradually to you mr prime minister and joining

that call this morning now in your who recalls a deal done between peres and his political rival yet section near to share the premiership on a rotating basis in the mid 1980 s. a clear hint that he was seeking something similar after conceding earlier on thursday that he didn't have a way to form a right wing government and appealing directly to get its binny we must set up a broad unity government as soon as today the nation expects us to both of us to demonstrate responsibility and that we pursue cooperation this is why i call on you binny let's meet today at any time to start this move which is the need of the hour but benny gantz is in no hurry rejecting netanyahu proposition that his likud join a government as part of a bloc including 3 other right wing and religious parties and making it clear that he expects to be prime minister. we will listen to all but don't surrender to any dictates the negotiations will be led by me responsibly and with reason in order to

achieve the. best results for all israelis within the shadow of this political situation we will keep to our principals who will be no short cuts senior figures in his blue and white alliance will more direct so you know when you whose presence is what is preventing the unity government and it's time for him to step aside is just the start of a bumpy bruising and unpredictable path towards coalition the opposition is already accusing benjamin netanyahu of obstructing it some see netanyahu is public approach to guns as a way of setting him up to take the blame if coalition talks fail all together and leaving behind it all the 2 things as you know is corruption cases is 1st pretty indictment hearing is due in october the 2nd and if all else fails a possible 3rd election in less than a year are a force that al-jazeera west jerusalem tehran is prepared for an all out war that's a threat from iran's foreign minister if the u.s. takes military action following the bombing of 2 major saudi arabian oil facilities john missouri says iran won't link to defend its territory if it's attacked is deny

tehran had any involvement in the drone strikes iran's oil minister meanwhile says the u.s. is using oil as a weapon to stir up a conflict the u.s. secretary of state however says the attack of the refineries was an act of war michael impale arrived in the u.a.e. for talks after visiting on prince on wednesday and at the united nations i sent a team of experts investigate the attacks in saudi and present donald trump has promised more sanctions on iran let's go to our white house correspondent kimberly healthcare for more on that so what exactly are the print trump administration's bandstand kimberly. well we know at this hour at least on thursday here in washington that there is a range of options being explored particularly when it comes to some sort of military response reportedly senior national security officials are meeting on thursday to refine the list of potential targets if the u.s. president decides to act in that matter these could include perhaps sites like

cruise missile sites inside iran where there could have been a potential launch even a cyber operation a covert cyber operation but this is in addition to what we understand is a plan in the works to also make some sort of diplomatic outreach at the upcoming u.n. general assembly this could be a little bit more difficult for the united states but we understand there is an effort underway to try and build some consensus for more economic sanctions against iran but given the international community's concern about saudi arabia's role when it comes to the saudi led conflict in yemen this could prove more challenging still this is some of the options that are being weighed by the administration as the u.s. secretary of state continues to push for economic sanctions and there will be more sanctions. we we have set about a course of action to deny iran the capacity and the wealth so that they can

conduct their tears and to prove to prevent them from conducting their care campaigns and you can see from the events of last week there's still more work to do we're going to continue to drive towards that end. you cannot fail to see the failed policy of giving money to this regime by what happened and saudi arabia. but we should point out in all of this the u.s. president who ultimately decide which course of action to take continues to send mixed signals vacillating between very tough rhetoric like locked and loaded in terms of response to keeping open the possibility of dialogue the latest from the u.s. president is that all things could happen we'll see what happens what is clear though is that this is an illustration continues to point the finger at iran laying the blame for that attack in saudi arabia while at the same time offering no evidence to support their argument thank you kimberly force at the white house in other

world news to nations former president zine el abidine ben ali has died at the age of $83.00 he was inside jerry be away had been living in exile since the $27.00 revolution and only had been in intensive care for 3 months share assad got 4 takes and look back at his legacy that's when he was swept from power by a wave of popular protests mean tunisia saudi arabia a former military man and diplomat. ben ali took the presidency in 1987 with a bloodless coup unseating the country's 1st post-colonial president in every election since he was returned to power with enormous majorities his opponents said the votes were rigged human rights groups described his government as authoritarian and undemocratic cracking down on any attempts at press freedom and handing out jobs and favors to a select band of support is. ultimately protests over unemployment want the

people out on the streets demanding change. to meet is economy looked relatively strong when the uprising began it was ranked 1st in africa the competitiveness. but accused of running a corrupt police state with money concentrated in the hands of a few powerful for. emilie's including his own most tunisians felt excluded under ben ali tunisia pursued a pro western foreign policy maintaining strong ties to former colonial master france and the us but as his regime crumbled france abandoned him refusing him entry as he fled the country saudi arabia offered him refuge in his final days but he will always be remembered as the president who was forced from office by an uprising of popular protest. who are 0 still ahead

on al-jazeera al-jazeera journalist take a stand calling for the release of mamata saying who has been imprisoned in egypt for a 1000 days. a week or for.